A Burning Sea

by Theodore Brun

  ‘Looks peaceful enough,’ observed Einar. ‘They said the caliph’s army was circling from the south but all I see that way is sea.’

  ‘This here is the Sea of Marmara.’ Demetrios swept his arm to the south. ‘It is small, hardly a day’s voyage one side to the other. That end lies another strait, even narrower than this one, called the Hellespont. The caliph’s armies have crossed there and are marching north towards the far side of the city.’

  ‘That wine merchant in the tavern last night said they had a strength of a hundred thousand. That must have been an exaggeration, hey?’

  Demetrios spat over the side. ‘I hope so, my friend. Truly, I hope so.’

  The oarsmen were pulling them through the wide entrance to a harbour on the south side of the promontory. ‘Behold, my friends!’ cried Demetrios. ‘The New Rome.’

  The harbour was buzzing with crafts of every shape and size – from two-man skiffs to bulky merchant vessels, butting and buffeting each other in the choppy waters. Stone quays sprang like dragon’s teeth from a causeway that ran along the foot of the huge sea wall.

  Their boatman yelled something in a bored voice. ‘Hands in,’ Demetrios told them, ‘unless you want to lose a finger.’

  The ferry shouldered its way into one of the quays like a wolf pup trying to get at its mother’s teat. The bows struck the quayside aglance and an oarsman jumped off to secure the bow-rope. A small crowd was already waiting at the top of the steps, presumably the ferryman’s return fares for the pull back to Chalcedon.

  ‘Time to pay Charon,’ said Demetrios.

  ‘Who?’ said Lilla.

  ‘Never mind.’ The Greek held out a calloused hand. ‘A copper coin for each of you. Two for me if I’m going back. That’s if you’re sure. . .’

  Lilla wasn’t sure of much just then but she refused to appear timorous. ‘You’ll be more use looking after Fasolt. And the men.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll listen to me. They are Northmen, after all.’

  ‘Just keep them out of trouble.’ She opened her leather purse and let him count out five copper coins into his palm.

  ‘God’s grace go with you, Lady,’ he said. ‘And remember what I told you.’

  Gerutha looked pale. Lilla didn’t blame her. The noise alone was intimidating with so many people crowding the causeway. ‘What are the crew going to do while we’re over here?’ Gerutha asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about them, lass,’ sniffed Einar. ‘They’ve got a town full of foreign tits, a tafl board and a barrel of wine. I imagine they’ll be very happy.’ He reached out his hand. ‘Shall we?’

  The gateway was like the entrance to a wasps’ nest, people swarming in and out of the city, and not one paying them the slightest heed. Einar walked ahead, Lilla and Gerutha arm in arm behind, staring in mute astonishment, their senses overwhelmed.

  Inside the wall, the street was clamouring with the rattle of handcarts and wagons, and packhorses and mules clopping along the pavings. There were myriad faces, skin of every shade: white, yellow, brown, even some black as jet-stone, though most were sun-bronzed like Lilla and her companions. As they shuffled onwards amongst the stream of people, the buildings rose over them like a canyon of stone, squeezing the sky into a slender belt of blue overhead. Lilla thought of her home in Uppsala where everything was wood. Here, everything was stone. Archways, columns, shops, street pavings, staircases that led who knew where, crowded porticos. It was too much to take in and she noticed only details. A baker pulling bread from an oven on a large wooden paddle, a boy knocking over a basket of yellow fruit, a roar of air as a furnace opened, two old men seated on a step concentrating on little black and white pieces on a chequered board scratched into its surface.

  They passed soldiers wearing plumed helmets, food hawkers yelling at the tops of their voices; whores cooing like doves to Einar who just laughed and walked on, holy men in long black robes with hems dragging through the gutter dung.

  ‘Gods in Asgard,’ Einar exclaimed in dismay as they spilled out of the street at the top of the hill. ‘How in the name of Odin’s arse are we going to find one man in all of this?’

  Before them spread a huge field of marble filled with people. At either end were two enormous gates, and forming the perimeter was an unbroken chain of towering white facades, more splendid still than anything they had seen so far. Shooting skywards from the very heart of the space was a massive column, thick and purple. Lilla’s gaze climbed in amazement, shielding her eyes against the sun to make out the statue at its summit. A man, rendered in solid bronze. Their god, she wondered, or else a king. Maybe even the Emperor Constantine from whom, she had heard, the city took one of its many names.

  She stared up at him for a moment and then her gaze came crashing down again to the level of the forum, where the chatter of hundreds of traders echoed off the marble houses. The improbability of finding Erlan amid all of this hit her like a fist in the belly.

  ‘We’re not here for one man,’ she said.

  ‘Aren’t we?’ returned Einar. ‘Then do you mind telling me why the Hel we are here?’

  ‘To see their king.’

  ‘Their king?’ Einar shook his head, exasperated.

  ‘Emperor,’ corrected Gerutha.

  ‘King, emperor? Whatever the son of a bitch calls himself, I’m sure he’s just dying to give you an audience, ain’t he? It’s not as if he’s a little busy with a war on or anything.’

  ‘You forget yourself, Fat-Belly,’ Lilla replied quietly, trying to keep her temper. ‘Besides, the emperor and I will meet as equals.’

  ‘Equals! Look about you, my girl! Whoever rules this place is as far above us poor wretches from the north as the stars in the sky.’

  ‘I’m not your girl, and don’t forget it,’ she snarled angrily. ‘He will meet with me. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘You’re sure of yourself, true enough,’ he replied sulkily, scuffing his toe in the dust.

  Gerutha took Lilla’s hand. ‘I believe in you,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ scowled Einar, turning away.

  ‘I do,’ insisted Gerutha. ‘And if Erlan is here, we will find him too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ smiled Lilla. She wished she had her servant’s confidence.

  ‘Sure, there can’t be many dark-haired cripples from the north in this city,’ added Gerutha.

  ‘And what if there’s none?’ snorted Einar. ‘What if he’s dead?’

  ‘He’s not dead,’ murmured Lilla. ‘He’s here. I know he is.’

  ‘Well, your faith in that is all very touching but let me remind you that this city is about to be sealed tighter than a dog’s arse. There’s a hundred thousand maniacs somewhere over there –’ he waved his paw vaguely to the west – ‘who could think of nothing finer than to bust in here and flatten the place, and everyone in it.’

  ‘We’ve come this far. I’m not afraid.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should be.’

  ‘All right then,’ she said, finally losing the will to fight him. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘I say we give ourselves a time limit. Five days. If we find no trace of Erlan and if you gain no audience with this emperor, we return to the ship and the crew.’

  ‘You saw how big the place was from the crossing,’ Gerutha countered. ‘In five days we’ll have barely scratched the surface.’

  ‘Look, you brought me along to protect you. And I ain’t about to let you two fine ladies fall into the hands of some rampaging horde of . . . whatever it is they call themselves.’

  ‘Arabs,’ said Gerutha.

  ‘Right then.’

  Lilla knew Einar had reason on his side, and that his intentions were only for her best. . . Then again she had left reason behind a long time ago. ‘No. We stay as long as we have to. I’m not leaving here without an answer.’

  ‘If the blockade closes and we’re still here—’

  ‘I know!’ she snapped. ‘Enough!’ Her head was spinning – with the heat a
nd the crowds and all that she’d seen. She wiped away the sweat beading on her brow. ‘It’s time to find our cripple,’ she said.

  A cripple, and a king.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  High above the plain rolling west from the Theodosian Walls, Emperor Leo the Isaurian – third of his name, and the seventh man to wear the purple in twenty years – stared out from the Gate of St Romanus.

  It was the second-highest point in the architect Anthemius’s formidable fortifications, perched atop the Seventh Hill. Byzantium had seven hills, just as Rome had seven hills. But Leo had no intention that his city would suffer its predecessor’s dismal fate.

  Katāros attended His Imperial Majesty, along with a small contingent of palace guards and the fat eparch Daniel, who was in danger of melting into a puddle of sweat on the baked pavings of the parapet. A breeze was blowing off the hot plain from the west, but it brought no relief from the unrelenting swelter of the summer sun. And it carried on its breath the stink of an army.

  They had been watching all morning, watching the dust cloud grow bigger and wider, watching for it to disgorge its mysteries within.

  Scouts had been flying in and out of the city with reports of the Arabs’ advance north from the Hellespont. The Emperor Leo had commanded that the land be razed ahead of them. He had been ruthless, leaving not a stalk of barley standing, and ordered any of the population who wanted to save themselves into the city. They had been pouring in for days.

  Meanwhile, Prince Maslama, brother of the Caliph Sulayman, rode at the head of his great army, leaving in its wake a trail of ransacked cities and burned towns all the way back to the Cilician Gates on the eastern frontier.

  And now all the rumours, all the reports, all the hearsay of bloodshed and terror, had come to their point in the dust cloud hanging over the plain.

  ‘There, Majesty – do you see?’ said the eparch.

  ‘I see.’ Leo’s tone was imperturbable as always.

  Sweat was streaming into Katāros’s eyes. He palmed it away and shaded his gaze. Out of the dust, he began to distinguish spear-points glinting in the sun, shields flashing many colours, banners and pennants waving in the westerly wind. Then camels and horsemen and foot soldiers in their thousands.

  The host kept coming, column after column, swallowing up the road and all the land around it. ‘Siege machines, there.’ Leo pointed out the tall, ungainly contraptions being dragged by oxen. At that distance they looked like children’s toys, but many a city to the east had learned how deadly those toys could be. ‘They hurl fire and stone.’

  ‘Some say they hurled shit at Pergamon,’ drawled Daniel. ‘And lime-dust. Even dead animals.’

  ‘They can throw what they like,’ replied Leo. ‘They won’t break our walls.’

  Katāros had heard a hundred people say the same in the last week. ‘They won’t break our walls.’ The Byzantines had good cause to be confident. The western fortifications were monumental. Three lines of defence, sheer cliffs of brick and stone. Massive structures that stretched south to the Marmara shore and north to the Golden Horn, sealing the peninsula of Byzantium behind its triple rampart and the brutishly squat towers that strengthened the walls every hundred paces. He looked away to the south. The parapets were lined with hundreds of spearmen, and arrayed among them on the wider walkways were the Byzantines’ own siege machines: mangonels and onagers that stood silent guard over the defences, ready to cast death on any Arab forces foolhardy enough to attempt a direct assault.

  The emperor indicated below and to the right where the valley of the Lycus river fell away. The Lycus was the city’s only natural water source, supplying the myriad channels that would eventually erupt from the fountains and bathhouses in the heart of the city. ‘We have to assume that they will cut the water course. Or else divert it.’

  ‘Let them, Majesty,’ declared Daniel, his tone irritatingly assured. ‘The city is ready. The cisterns are full. The granaries are crammed to bursting. Maslama’s army cannot hurt us.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’ Leo scanned with his soldier’s eye further south, distracted perhaps by the sound of chanting. ‘Here they come again.’ He nodded at the small procession of priests approaching from the direction of the Rhesios Gate along the peribolos – the terrace of ground that lay between the inner and outer walls. ‘If the Almighty is persuaded by he who makes most noise, then no one has done more for the city’s defence than those priests.’

  Katāros had never quite figured whether Leo was a devout or a cynic when it came to matters of the Faith. Whenever Katāros took him for one, the emperor made a comment that seemed to prove the other. So Katāros reserved judgement and kept his own thoughts on such matters to himself.

  Three times they had listened to Patriarch Germanus and his chanting priests pass below, bearing before them the holy icon of the Blessed Virgin in the hope that she would bless the Byzantines’ defences against the coming onslaught. Her special favour on the city was said to be its surest strength. The chronicles recorded how forty years earlier the Mother of God had stood by the Emperor Constantine Augustus in his hour of peril. And despite five years under the heel of the Arab siege, the walls – and the city – still stood. But would the Blessed Mother stand by the Emperor Leo now? If she didn’t, the empire was lost.

  ‘Germanus has been hectoring me to declare a Day of Repentance,’ said Leo. ‘Every man, woman and child to perform the Eucharist. What do you think, Lord Eparch? Shall I agree to it?’

  Daniel’s fat nostrils flared. ‘Germanus calls for whatever inflates his own standing.’

  ‘You doubt his sincerity?’

  ‘Don’t you, Majesty?’

  But Leo didn’t answer. His mouth only flickered momentarily with an inscrutable smile.

  ‘A day of repentance,’ the eparch continued. ‘I mean, what difference could it really make? We have taken every precaution, made every provision. Every crack in these walls has been repaired. There is nothing more that can be done. That is what will save this city. Forethought. Preparation. The patrician mind –’ he tapped his temple with a fat jewelled finger – ‘not a bunch of grovelling paupers wailing to the heavens.’

  ‘Yet if prayer could truly move the hand of the Almighty, a man would be a fool not to pray.’ Leo turned to Katāros. ‘What say you, grand chamberlain?’

  Katāros dabbed the corner of his sleeve at the sweat hovering on the corner of his eyebrow. ‘I say faith has its place. And these walls are no doubt strong. But I expect Your Majesty will have to deploy cunning as well as faith if Christ’s citadel is to withstand the infidel horde.’

  ‘Hmm,’ mused Leo. ‘Wise as the serpent, innocent as the dove.’

  ‘Just so, Majesty,’ Katāros replied with an ingratiating little bow. Although he might have put it differently. Wise as the serpent, and just as deadly.

  If the walls of Byzantium could not be smashed, then he had to find another way.

  And he would.

  ‘Cut them off.’

  ‘My lord,’ said Silanos, somewhat alarmed at the way this was falling out, ‘is there not a more reasonable course to take?’

  ‘Reasonable be damned,’ Arbasdos answered, in a voice cold with anger. ‘Cut off his balls and feed them to my dogs.’ Silanos sighed. He had hoped that being newly wed might have mellowed his master’s irascible nature. It seemed not.

  On the other hand, there was no doubt his anger had some justification. A runaway slave was an insult to any man.

  Silanos felt the barb of betrayal himself after the kindness he had shown the Northman. He’d had his reasons, of course. Valuable property had to be looked after; although just then the Northman was looking pretty worthless.

  He was kneeling on the flagstones of the main courtyard under guard, one side of his face swollen and turning purple before their eyes. His nose was bloody, his eye black, and his sullen expression had become downright murderous. The very opposite of the clean, obliging, intelligent warrior Silanos had ho
ped to cultivate. And now the general wanted to castrate the fool. Silanos saw all his efforts pouring like water into the dust.

  It had been a bloody day. That oaf Marcellos had been whipped to within an inch of his life for his oversight. Silanos understood he probably wouldn’t live out the day, which was a shame. The man had claimed he had no memory at all of the night before. But that was exactly the problem. He’d been found dead drunk with the key on his belt, the door of the Northman’s cell flung wide with no explanation. Silanos had always said too much wine will kill a man. Marcellos was about to prove his point.

  ‘Bring the knife,’ Arbasdos snapped. ‘We’ll geld the scum, then flog him to death. Let him be a lesson to the others.’

  ‘Of course, we need to make an example of him, my lord – but you mean to keep him, surely?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘One doesn’t destroy a wild horse for throwing its rider. Patience is the key. It takes time to break even the finest stallion.’

  ‘Cut his balls off,’ said Davit, the general’s ham-fisted spatharios who was also in attendance, regrettably. ‘That’ll calm the son of a bitch down.’

  A singularly unhelpful interjection. ‘The fiercest hunting dogs are left intact, my lord. This man will be no use to you as a house pet.’ If this continued, he would soon run out of analogies.

  ‘His nose then,’ suggested Davit. ‘An ugly warrior is right enough to purpose, eh?’

  ‘In your case, undoubtedly.’ Arbasdos chuckled at this. Thank God. Silanos had never been able to abide the sight of those kind of mutilations. Split noses, severed ears, plucked eyeballs. He found all of that revolting.